A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

Tag: tech/AI: education

    • K12 Dive
    • 04/10/26
    “Just a few months into this initiative of what is often described as “vibe coding,” the district expects to save up to $250,000 in canceled ed tech contracts alone by the 2026-27 school year, said Kris Hagel, the district’s chief information officer. The district has already identified three or four software subscription tools it will […]
    • New York Times
    • 03/27/26
    “In the world of physical health, we now know we should largely avoid ultraprocessed snacks like Doritos and Oreos, which are Frankenfoods made by reconstituting stock ingredients like corn and soy with hyperpalatable ratios of salt, sugar and fat. Much of the digital content that ensnares our attention in the current moment is also ultraprocessed, […]
    • Harvard Business Review
    • 03/12/26
    “When multiple leaders have legitimate claims to the same jurisdiction, organizations typically default to one of four responses: Hand it to the most capable leader, Give it to the squeakiest wheel, Ship it off to a committee, Pass it to whoever has existing budget. However, none of these will work for agentic AI. The stakes […]
    • Burning Glass Institute
    • 02/25/26
    “AI is reshaping which skills matter for professional success—and, therefore, what students need to learn. This report provides a data-driven framework for K-12 educators to navigate this shift, analyzing AI’s impact on 1,000 workforce skills and mapping the implications for 140 high school learning objectives. It offers a clear method for identifying where and how […]
    • Mike Kentz
    • 02/02/26
    “For most of the twentieth century, assessment worked on a simple assumption: completing the task required doing the thinking. If a student submitted an essay, they probably wrote it. If a job applicant submitted a polished cover letter, they probably had the writing skills it demonstrated. The act of production and the act of understanding […]
    • New York Times
    • 01/28/26
    “To familiarize herself with the audition process, she used ChatGPT to create a spreadsheet of information about 45 schools, including columns for scholarship opportunities and the average flight cost from Memphis.”

ADMISSIONS

ASSESSMENT

CHARACTER

    • Sweet GrAIpes
    • 10/08/25
    “The same AI might behave cautiously when discussing medical topics but exploratively when tackling creative writing. Effective users recognize these shifts and adjust their approach accordingly. That’s cognitive work, building and updating mental models of how the system operates in different contexts… Cognitive empathy manifests as systematic pattern recognition. You notice that ChatGPT tends toward […]
    • Round Square
    • 09/09/25

CREATIVITY

    • LinkedIn
    • 06/10/25
    “Creativity isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s the connective thread across every part of the school system—from what students do to how adults lead. Below are five commitments that aren’t siloed strategies, but mutually reinforcing actions that help creativity grow. It must be structurally embedded in curriculum, assessment, adult roles, and resource allocation.”
    • Journal of Creativity
    • 03/01/24
    “Results also demonstrated the potential and constraints of human-AI collaboration, particularly that ChatGPT-3 is best utilized for fluency and elaboration during divergent thinking, while flexibility and originality are best augmented by human creative and critical analysis. These results suggest that students should not rely on AI for answers but use AI’s high fluency and elaboration […]
    • Leon Furze
    • 02/19/24

CURRICULUM

    • Burning Glass Institute
    • 02/25/26
    “AI is reshaping which skills matter for professional success—and, therefore, what students need to learn. This report provides a data-driven framework for K-12 educators to navigate this shift, analyzing AI’s impact on 1,000 workforce skills and mapping the implications for 140 high school learning objectives. It offers a clear method for identifying where and how […]
    • Rick Hess on Education
    • 01/07/26
    • Augmented Educator
    • 08/26/25
    “It is not an “AI curriculum”; it is a comprehensive framework for critical thinking in a multi-modal world. AI is the catalyst that makes these skills urgent, but their scope is far broader. 1) Critical Reading: This is no longer just about analyzing a printed text. It’s about interrogating the logic of hyperlinks, understanding the […]
    • ASCD
    • 07/01/25

GOVERNMENT

HIGHER ED

HISTORY OF EDUCATION

    • AI Edu Pathways
    • 07/28/25
    “The difficulties associated with teaching and measurement do not need to be viewed as a burden. Instead, we can see it as an opportunity to deepen our metacognition and self-awareness via our interactions with the tools. Viewing AI Literacy as “metacognition on the page” will assist in charting meaningful pathways towards greater intellectual skill and […]

HUMANITIES

    • Constructive Dialogue Institute
    • 03/01/26
    • New York Times
    • 06/16/25
    “Among the historians I spoke with, one of the more enthusiastic experimenters was Fred Turner, who teaches in the communication department at Stanford. I arrived at his office expecting to interview him about how A.I. fits into the long history of information technology, but we wound up spending much of our time discussing how ChatGPT […]

LANGUAGE

    • Center for Curriculum Redesign
    • 09/09/22
    “In spite of, and due to, automatic language translation, the goal of foreign language education in CCR’s model is to render students fluent in one to two more languages than their own native one, by starting during early childhood and deep learning. CCR advocates for second language acquisition due to the following benefits:”

LEADERSHIP

    • K12 Dive
    • 04/10/26
    “Just a few months into this initiative of what is often described as “vibe coding,” the district expects to save up to $250,000 in canceled ed tech contracts alone by the 2026-27 school year, said Kris Hagel, the district’s chief information officer. The district has already identified three or four software subscription tools it will […]
    • Harvard Business Review
    • 03/12/26
    “When multiple leaders have legitimate claims to the same jurisdiction, organizations typically default to one of four responses: Hand it to the most capable leader, Give it to the squeakiest wheel, Ship it off to a committee, Pass it to whoever has existing budget. However, none of these will work for agentic AI. The stakes […]
    • Sweet GrAIpes
    • 08/06/25
    • One Useful Thing
    • 05/22/25
    “The key is treating AI adoption as an organizational learning challenge, not merely a technical one. Successful companies are building feedback loops between Leadership, Lab, and Crowd that let them learn faster than their competitors. They are rethinking fundamental assumptions about how work gets done. And, critically, they’re not outsourcing or ignoring this challenge.”

LEARNING SCIENCE

PD

    • ASCD
    • 02/01/25
    “Team members would rather not disrupt the community by challenging ideas presented by their colleagues. When AI is used as a thought partner, the results are profoundly different. The end products are stronger because the team spends more time refining ideas, engaging with student data, and developing content based on the rich discussions had.”

PEDAGOGY

    • Teaching in the Age of AI
    • 01/19/26
    “If a student uploads their notes to an AI platform – notes they took, from research they conducted, reflecting ideas they developed – and it produces professional looking slides, and then the student stands up and explains the material cogently, answers questions thoughtfully, demonstrates clear understanding through their delivery… What exactly has been offloaded? The […]
    • Chronicle of Higher Ed
    • 12/16/25
    “Go ahead and keep assigning essays and using short lectures to expose students to new knowledge, if those practices fit your pedagogical convictions. But in 2026 and beyond, we do need to commit more fully to shifting the balance of class time from first exposure to skills practice… The stumbling block you may encounter if […]
    • ASCD
    • 07/01/25
    “While I’m a fan of traditional feedback methods and the human touch, my students and I were all surprised by how aligned the AI tutor’s feedback was with my feedback. In some cases, it went even further and gave some insights that I had overlooked in grading the essay. While I wouldn’t turn over my […]
    • Dan Meyer
    • 03/06/24
    “All good tasks should be, by design or fortunate accident, “low threshold, high ceiling”. Low threshold so that nearly all people can make a start and high ceiling so that there’s always some higher order avenue to work towards.”
    • Sense and Sensation
    • 12/15/23
    “While AI can help students analyze text, identify detail in an image, and structure a work of writing, only the student can apply this understanding to her world. Only the student can integrate new understanding into his school community and personal relationships. Only the student can practice new habits based on new ideas and understanding […]

READING/WRITING

STEM

    • Dan Meyer
    • 01/21/26
    “In the past, coaches, experts, and publishers have all asked teachers to… Select and sequence student responses, construct a student-facing discussion resource, lead the conversation. Now we are asking teachers to… Lead the conversation.”
    • The 74 Million
    • 09/18/25
    • Mike Kentz
    • 09/15/25
    “Then we introduced the challenge: they would conduct a chemistry experiment AND learn to use AI as a research tool. The ground rules were simple—use AI to ask any questions needed to fill out their worksheet and design an experiment using the provided compounds. All approved experimental protocols would be conducted the next day.”
    • NCTM
    • 02/25/24
    “Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven tools can respond to students’ thinking and interests in ways that previous tools could not… Students will continue to need teachers’ mathematical, pedagogical, and relational expertise, though teachers are also likely to benefit from AI-driven tools. In some cases, AI may serve as a teaching assistant, but students will need teachers to […]

TECH

A.I. Updates

    • Alex Kotran
    • 04/09/26
    “6. Once someone builds something real, it changes them… You go from “building things is not for people like me, that’s for engineers” to “I wonder if I could build that” to “I think I could build that” to “I know I can build that.” And as you progress, you’re asking those same questions in […]
    • Education Disrupted
    • 03/19/26
    “I typed a simple prompt: “I’d like to build an app that fact-checks articles on the web.” And Claude built it.”
    • Teaching in the Age of AI
    • 03/16/26
    “When I first started using AI seriously, I was doing what most teachers do – asking questions, iterating on responses, but primarily generating text – converting ideas into polished plans and getting feedback and analysis on my own work. AI remains useful for all of those tasks. But agentic AI introduces something fundamentally different. I […]
    • Anthropic
    • 02/23/26
    “Iteration and refinement is the single strongest correlate of all other fluency behaviors in our data. So, when you get an initial response, it’s worth treating it as only a starting point: ask follow-up questions, push back on any parts that don’t feel right, and refine what you’re looking for.”
    • Dr. Philippa Hardman
    • 02/19/26
    “AI-only feedback and support seems most effective when tasks are low-stakes, tightly structured, and not identity-relevant: grammar correction, coding syntax, multiple-choice practice, drill exercises. In these contexts, AI is functional, welcome, and effective. The Karimova and Csapó (2024) meta-review found its strongest gains in exactly these structured, skill-based domains. Students consistently draw the line themselves. […]
    • New York Times
    • 02/09/26
    “The patient says, “Yesterday I woke up dizzy. My arm was dead, and I had trouble speaking.” What does “dizzy” actually mean? It could mean the patient is lightheaded and about to faint. Or it could mean that the room is spinning. A “dead” arm might be numb rather than weak. Someone with an arm […]

TECH/AI: EDUCATION

TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK

TECH/AI: SOCIAL

    • EdSurge
    • 01/16/26
    • EdTech Insiders
    • 01/08/26
    “Unlike the solo AI agent paradigm dominating headlines, multi-user collaborative AI represents something fundamentally different and truly exciting: AI as social infrastructure that strengthens relationships and encourages collaboration. This is why one of my predictions for 2026 is that it will be the year that “Social AI” breaks into the mainstream, especially in education.”

TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS

Issues

Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.

Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.

Peter Nilsson

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